About the Paintings

An insight into some of the ideas that I have in making them.

I believe that the real purpose of life is to be found in the Spiritual.In other words the true Reality is the Spiritual Reality. We are spiritual entities in a physical body and one can begin to penetrate the spiritual realm through prayer and meditation. All cultures have found a way to access this dimension of human experience. My way is through meditation and so most of the paintings in some way refer to this. The experience(s) of meditation are many yet it remains a way to penetrate to the very essence of our beings, to the 'universe' inside each one of us.

Mankind is always searching for knowledge to try and understand the Reality of our world, of the Universe, of ourselves…of the beginning of everything. Science has revealed an enormous amount of information and the knowledge gained in every discipline expands almost daily, yet for each discovery, there is always further questions. The sages would say that the truth…the ultimate truth cannot be expressed…it can only be understood as Mystery. To understand Mystery requires another faculty of being human…the ability to believe, to have faith…this quality or gift enables human beings to transcend themselves. Our imagination is perhaps our greatest ability. Every great discovery and enterprise originated firstly in the mind of somebody.

Reality as demonstrated by science is multi layered…taking the most mundane object we can go from its physical presence,what we can see with the naked eye, and enter into it with the aid of the microscope and deeper still with the electron microscope and recently a scientist said why bother building any more instruments at fantastic cost…we can go infinitely small!! Many pictures refer to the atomic or sub atomic realm, the quantum level.

We can see that in our own lives…even the most basic encounter with another human being can be viewed from so many different perspectives and within our own minds we are receiving thousands of impressions each minute…it is amazing…we process all this information. Some paintings are referring to our minds and memory…often all we remember of an experience is a fragment, like a snapshot.

The advances in neuroscience interest me…the trillions of connections inside our brains, and the development of consciousness.

The development of the internet, the proliferation of communication devices is generating what is called DATA… BIG DATA.Various bodies (CIA?) particularly in the United States are building warehouses the size of ten football pitches to store the collected data…and when you think that so much can be stored on a chip the size of a thumbnail….there are literally billions of photographs being posted onto the internet every day. We can see the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate.

So I have used various concepts such as Tiling a theory proposed by Roger Penrose to depict the way nature forms

Mathematics …it is through mathematics that scientists are able to develop theories and prove or disprove them… I am in awe at the ability of these great mathematicians…my contribution is the fractal shapes that I use within the simpler Euclidean ones of the square the circle and the triangle.

These simple shapes fascinate me greatly…the circle as a symbol of perfection and wholeness and the triangle as the most basic of shapes. We start with a point….two points in space connected give us a straight line and the addition of a third point not on the line when joined to the existing points give rise to the triangle. I once had a recurring dream as a child where I saw a triangle, was somehow engaged or connected to this triangle. Perhaps it was learning at Catholic School the doctrine of the Trinity. That God is three persons in One…it terrified me…because it was alive…

.So some of the paintings are developing the idea of a possible universe populated with simple shapes…though as I have discovered, nothing is simple when we look into it deeply enough…and so the simple triangle has within it a whole moving universe of biomorhic or fractal shapes… and lives and moves in an equally complex environment

I believe there are patterns in nature that permeate or are the basis of all created things…we can see them in everything natural around us, the grain in wood for instance…the skin of a fish...the clouds in the sky... the images we get from the Hubble Telescope and the electron microscope.

And again I find great joy and inspiration in the work of other artists…the magnificent body of work that is contained in our museums all over the world…what a thrill to see again albeit on Twitter the great Edvard Munch painting of Sunset

I am not a scientist or mathematician or a Guru…I am a painter. Yet I recognize that the truth of our reality of our existence is somehow reflected in their work. There is such immanent joy in nature, in all creation …we feel it more at certain times than others… and there is sorrow too…yet the inner life , the inner pulse of creation is joy…is love.

I want to communicate my own excitement and joy in being alive and all that I see.

About the Prints

I decided to make prints of the paintings available as many people asked me if it was possible to get an image of the original painting.The original painting being sold. I looked into the best way to give them a copy as close to the original as possible. The answer was a Giclee Print. So What you may ask is a Giclee Print.A Giclee Print (pronounced 'gee-clay') is an extremely high quality digital print that is created using an ultra-fine injet printing process to produce images of intense colour and vibrancy. The ink used is lightfast and comes with an 85year lightfast guarantee. The print is made on acid-free,mould made, cotton based award winningHahnemuhle paper with superior surface stability. The Giclee print is the closest we can get to the original painting and as it is part of a limited edition, numbered and signed by me it is a work of art in its own right.Of course it will never be as valuable as the original however the image is as close to the original as technology will allow.